Watch out for increasingly vicious anti-Israel Israel propaganda

We have no idea who Bruce Baker is, nor do we know a great deal about the Broomfield Enterprise — the neighborhood newspaper which recently published a letter to the editor by Baker — but we do know propaganda when we see it.

Baker’s letter, entitled “Holocaust happening now in Israel,” was published in the Enterprise on Feb. 18. A copy of the paper ended up on the driveway of a Jewish resident of Broomfield — a person who happens to be a Holocaust survivor — who then, understandably upset, called the article to our attention.

Baker’s letter strives to make the case that the Jewish Holocaust of WW II is now being repeated in Israel, except this time the perpetrators are Israelis and the victims are Palestinians.

In addition to the claim that “the Israeli government has confined millions of men, women and children in concentration camps” — as if the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip can be called a concentration camp, and as if living in those regions is somehow comparable to being “confined” within them — the letter points to two individual cases which ostensibly prove that “the Holocaust in Israel” is a reality.

One is the death in 2003 of Rachel Corrie, the young American activist who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer as she acted as a “human shield” to prevent what she apparently believed was an attempt to destroy a Palestinian home.

“Rachel was intentionally crushed to death by an Israeli soldier driving a bulldozer,” Baker writes. “He was ‘following orders.’”

We’ll overlook the clever “following orders” reference as part of the writer’s stubborn attempt to equate Israel with the Third Reich, but have no choice but to point out the bald dishonesty in the rest of the sentence.

Some of the events surrounding Corrie’s death are still in dispute — especially the part about the driver’s intentions. Unless Baker has rare and mystical powers of clairvoyance, he has absolutely no idea what the driver’s intentions might have been.

The bulldozer operator swore that he didn’t see her. An exhaustive Israeli investigation backed him up, after interviewing witnesses and studying the limited visibility in the type of equipment he was driving. Even some of Corrie’s fellow activists who were at the scene have conceded the possibility that she may have been killed unintentionally.

In any case, Israel hasn’t shut any doors on the case. Some of Corrie’s fellow activists in the International Solidarity Movement will testify at a civil trial set to begin in Haifa next week. We trust that their testimony, and that of others, will be heard, discussed and considered as Israel is unafraid to continue to search for the truth.

Another case cited by letter-writer Baker is that of Iman al-Hams, a 13-year old Palestinian girl who was shot and killed by Israeli troops as she approached a military observation post in 2004.

According to Baker: “An Israeli captain decreed she should be killed. Some soldiers shot and wounded her. The captain then walked up to Iman, switched his gun to automatic and fired all the bullets in his magazine into her.”

This time, the writer is being partially truthful. Although the officer in question did shoot al-Hams, apparently in the belief that she posed a threat to his position, he did not  fire “all the bullets in his magazine.”

During an Israeli military investigation into the incident, that part of the story — along with several other exaggerations and elaborations — was later discovered to be an untruth cooked up by soldiers under the officer’s command, apparently eager to have him reassigned.

That doesn’t change the fact that a 13-year-old girl was wrongly killed, and we use the word “wrongly” with care. Whether al-Hams was killed by accident or because an Israeli military officer overstepped his authority, the result is unacceptable. Frankly, we’ve never been satisfied with the IDF’s ultimate decision to acquit the still-unnamed officer in this case.

But that’s neither here nor there, in comparison to the charge of  “Holocaust in Israel.”

While we agree that the deaths of Corrie and al-Hams were tragic events — events which might warrant further investigation — these are stories that must be told truthfully, not with the exaggerations, innuendos, half-truths and outright lies that are increasingly becoming the language of reflexive Israel-haters.

The greatest lie in Baker’s letter, course, is that the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians is somehow equivalent to the Nazi Holocaust, a falsehood that is not only ridiculous at its very root but deeply insulting to anyone concerned with truth or human rights.

It’s a lie on a par with the one currently being repeated on college campuses across the nation and world — that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land somehow amounts to the same thing as the racial apartheid once practiced by South Africa.

These dishonesties do more than insult our collective intelligence. By equating complex modern political conflicts with utterly different historical atrocities, propagandists like Baker not only oversimplify and cheapen important debates, but diminish the chance that solutions can be found for the problems they supposedly care about.